


You've Got That (One Thing)

by tracinginthesand



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes has a crush, Bucky's POV, M/M, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 05:50:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7606105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tracinginthesand/pseuds/tracinginthesand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky has a lot of feelings about Tony Stark. Might just want to watch him for the rest of his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You've Got That (One Thing)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Livvy1800](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Livvy1800/gifts), [msxylda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/msxylda/gifts).



> So this is because my friends wanted it and it didn't quite exist.

1.

Stark Tower, late at night. Bucky Barnes is on the prowl. He hardly sleeps. He can’t sleep. When there’s another body in the bed, a sensation Hydra didn’t know to take from him, he can rest. Most nights that’s Steve and his furnace, but Bucky doesn’t want to cramp his style, not now that Pepper’s taken to spending the night. Tashka will rest with him, the two of them talking quietly in Russian until the sun comes up, and that’s good. That’s so good. The only line he can draw that leads his past to his present.

Passing in front of the windows like a shadow, a suggestion, negative space where a person should be. New York City looks like some artist’s rendering of a futuristic metropolis. But then, to Bucky’s eyes, it looked like that in the 30s. Some nights he’s so overwhelmed by the beauty of it, the fierce, defiant joy that he survived to stare at the city, to sit cross-legged with his knees against the windows and a tablet in his lap. Seventy years of comic books to catch up on, and him lit from below like he’s going to tell ghost stories. Like he’s a gargoyle. Or a golem.

Nights like this, nothing’ll settle him. He just creeps around and wants. The R&D lab is his goal, that space where the object of his exasperation doesn’t sleep, just swings his hips and rolls his head on his shoulders to whatever beat’s got him. He knows where Bucky is, as the assassin circles him. Stares from different vantage points, since the lab is designed to be in the middle of everything. Bucky wants to not sleep with him. But they have their truces and their unspokens just like everyone in this asylum for the not-quite-damned. And Bucky did assassinate his parents.

2.

Part of getting back to the land of the living is wanting to do the things that make him feel alive. And Tony Stark makes him feel alive. They spent a lot of time together before Bucky was quite right in the head. Tony worked on his arm, tinkering and examining. Touching it all over. He was detached about it. Clinical. Bucky was still so out of it then that he didn’t realize what it must have been doing to Tony, to spend so much time on someone who had, whether he wanted to or not, caused so much pain. They got through it. They aren’t exactly friends, but they can send banter back and forth from opposite sides of a long dinner table and make everyone lose their shit laughing. Bucky will sometimes throw Tony a salute after, just to see him blink and point his face in another direction.

Bucky recognizes Tony. He knows him on a visceral level he doesn’t really understand anymore. Not because of any similarity to Howard Stark. He knows Tony from high school, from the boys who caught their eyes on him and couldn’t pull away. The intense ones who rode the subway to school before dawn and were back by lunch. And Bucky was no slouch with a slide rule, but he wasn’t a Stuyvesant kid. His talents lay in other areas. Like leaning on a lamppost at the corner by the St. George Hotel on High Street and greeting those boys back to Brooklyn every afternoon. Getting them to blink the equations out of their eyes for a few minutes.

So what if he’d like to get laid again. Steve and he rolled around with their clothes on, just to see, but it’s not necessary for them. Hell, he and Tashka went a couple rounds before they agreed it was too much effort for too little return. Bucky doesn’t just want to get off. He wants to fuck. He wants to have his way with. He wants to play. Fire words back and forth and twitch his fingers and feel the other person go off.

He wants Tony. Tony, who wants his attention because he wants everyone’s attention and can’t seem to help himself. Tony, who looks pained when Bucky wears long sleeves and even more pained when he doesn’t. Tony, who wants to touch. Who wants to play just as bad, but keeps it bottled up behind licked lips and too many words. Bucky could just sit and listen to him talk for hours. He’s that far gone.

Which is why on nights when Tony isn’t in his lab, when he has an event to go to and stumbles home with someone laughing and a little boozed up who will be ejected in the morning without so much as a goodbye kiss, Bucky feels a little bit put upon.

3.

“Ow.”

“Steve.”

“Ow.”

“Steve.”

“Ow. Bucky, would you stop hitting your forehead between my shoulder blades, please? There’s a perfectly good wall over there.”

“Might dent the wall.”

“Your concern for me is touching.”

“The US Army paid good money to keep you from denting. He brought a fucking ballet dancer home.”

“A...huh?”

“Tony. Brought home. A ballet dancer. Think about it. Think about what they’re doing. Right now.”

“What--no! No, I am not going to think about that.”

“Bet he’s real flexible, pal.”

“You have the murder look in your eyes.”

“If I have to watch Tony bring one more fucking person home, I’ll return to my dangerous ways. He brought home the damned star of the American Ballet Theater. The damned Russian star.”

“The one who looks like you?”

“Shut your--he doesn’t.”

“The one from the video in the church? He absolutely does.”

“Well, fuck me.”

“Been there, done that, got the--ow! Bucky!”

4.

“Hey, doll,” Bucky says, hanging in the doorway to Tony’s lab. Tony turns like the crack of a whip, worn band shirt tight over his chest. His eyes rake Bucky all over. Bucky never feels sexier these days than when Tony is sizing him up.

Might be why he’s shirtless. He technically has a shirt. It’s slung over his right shoulder. Bucky’s all stretched out. Never let it be said he doesn’t know how to accentuate the positive.

Tony’s mouth turns up at one corner. He’s twitching a pen back and forth in his fingers like he can’t help it.

“What can I do for you, Sergeant?”

“Arm hurts,” Bucky says. It’s true. It does hurt. It hurts almost all the time, heavy and awkward. It wasn’t designed to be used all the time, to be at body temperature for more than a few hours, days at a time at most. Tony’s come up with various fixes when Bucky tells him, which isn’t often. Bucky doesn’t like asking Tony to help him.

Tony waves him over. Bucky sits backwards in a dining room chair, leaning his forearms on it. Tony comes up behind him and starts mapping out the arm with his hands, lingering on the seam between Bucky’s metal shoulder and the scarred flesh around it.

“Good night last night?” Bucky asks, to distract himself. Tony’s hands feel too much like memories. He wants to pull Tony into his lap, let Tony touch him from there. He tilts his head to the right, exposing his throat. Tony hums approvingly, and then grabs a hair elastic from god-knows-where and pulls Bucky’s hair into a loose bun on the back of his head. Bucky swallows. He likes having his hair played with. He likes it long. He likes Tony’s clever fingers in it.

“Dancers,” Tony says, like it’s a joke they should both get.

As soon as Tony’s gotten up to do whatever it is, Bucky flips in the chair, crossing his ankles, folding his hands behind his head. “Russian dancers with dark hair. Did he call you--” he slides into Russian for a torrent of obscenity, noting how it makes Tony’s shoulders tense and his head tip back, just a little. Then Tony spins on his heel.

“Don’t think so, Sarge, his mouth was pretty busy the whole time.”

“That doesn’t sound very generous of you, Tony.”

“I’m not a very generous man,” Tony fires back.

“That’s a lie. Maybe you’re just not generous in bed,” Bucky suggests. The drawl in his voice is a surprise. He didn’t quite remember that part of himself. “I can see it. Just focused on yourself, on what you need.” He gets to his feet in one long motion he knows Tony can see from the corner of his eye. Leans against Tony’s workbench, arms crossed. Curls one side of his mouth up. He knows he’s lying. He knows Tony is attentive, interested, and a lot of fun in bed. (Pepper told him, because he asked. Bucky is coming to realize he has a problem.)

Tony’s mouth curves. “Don’t know about that, Sarge. If either one of us is frigid, it’s you.”

“Well, I’ve had more practice,” Bucky says, amazed in some part of his brain that he’s joking about years of torture and cryo-freeze like it’s nothing. “What do you say, want to practice being a pillow princess for me?”

“I’ll get my tiara.” Tony says, fluttering his long, long eyelashes.

“Suits you,” Bucky says, and they’re very close, all of a sudden. Tony’s chin tipped up, maintaining eye contact, and Bucky is reminded that while he might act like a fractious teenager most of the time, Tony has fifteen years lived experience on him, and spent most of them, if the stories are to be believed, having sex. Tony smiles, eyes crinkling, as he raises his hand and drives a screwdriver into one of the many reset points in Bucky’s arm.

He’s never been happier to be a freakish science experiment.

5.

Bucky is leaning against the bar during one of the “Hey, look, come rub shoulders with the Avengers” parties that go on more frequently. He’s just happy he isn’t one of them. Yet. Apparently there’s still some pushback to the idea that a former POW and brainwashed assassin can do the right thing when he’s in his right mind. Bucky doesn’t let himself mind.

Steve and Pepper are the ultimate power couple out there in the middle of the floor. He’s got a hand just hovering at her back, and they lean into each other so naturally. Bucky catches sight of Tony, looking at the two of them with a lost expression, before he throws himself into conversation with another senator. Watching Tony wind himself tighter and tighter is simultaneously frustrating and glorious. He leaves a trail of chaos in his wake, and in search of order, the people he’s talked into a spiral making a beeline for Pepper and Captain America to direct them. While Tony bounces off the next person, and the next, and the next.

Is anyone going to acknowledge the debt they owe Tony Stark, ever? Is he always going to be the bad guy when it’s convenient, the gumball machine for brilliance when it’s necessary?

Bucky gets between Tony and his next target, putting all the quiet menace he can gather up into his body language. “Mr. Stark,” he says. “You have a call.” His metal hand closes ever-so-gently around Tony’s elbow.

“I have a call,” Tony says to the senator from New York, shrugging like he can’t believe it, either. Bucky leads him up the stairs and down a hallway almost at random. Now they’re staring at each other in the warm, ultra-modern lighting coming from the panels in the floor. The hallway is dim and welcoming all at once, the light turning Tony’s eyes to amber.

“I don’t have a call.”

“No.”

Tony is practically vibrating out of his skin. “I should be down there.”

“Maybe.” Bucky shrugs out of his jacket, unbuttons his vest. His shirt. He takes Tony’s wrists and presses those clever hands to his abdomen. Slides them up to his ribs. Tony makes a sound. A quiet, short sound.

“Why are you doing this?” His voice is a whisper. Bucky leans close, so his hair falls against Tony’s cheek.

“So you remember how to do something other than lose.”

6.

Tony likes being watched. He preens under the attention. And Bucky has time to stare. He starts shadowing Tony to meetings. An unofficial bodyguard, maybe. Although princes shouldn’t kiss the help quite so often.

They kiss, now. Long, deep kisses, because when Tony discovers something he likes, he does it as often as possible. He pokes and prods at Bucky, looking for the way to get the arm off, looking for a way in he understands. Bucky sympathizes. He’s looking for the same thing. Tony’s one of the brilliant rich kids, and Bucky is a hustler on a street corner. Tony is fast, but all Bucky has to do is reach and Tony spins into his orbit like it's all he ever wanted to do.

So Tony goes to his meetings and Bucky slouches in the corner, happy to keep his head at a degree of unnatural angle to make them all think twice about the snide comments, the insults, the obvious disbelief. Tony can chew it all up and spit it back at them like shrapnel if he wants to. It lands, though. Seems like he’s destined to go through life following a fast-taking pain in the ass with a death wish.

Worse things. 


End file.
